Sunday, September 25, 2016

Intersectionalism and the danger of political bundling

One of my Facebook friends is not a smart man.He is
also very conservative.On occasion,
these traits lead him to say some ridiculous things.

For example, being conservative, he thinks the following things are bad:

Liberals

Obama

Political
correctness

Islam

Socialism/communism

Open
borders

Atheism

The
UN

None of these things are totally unreasonable to oppose on their own. I oppose several of them myself. But my Facebook friend, being a simple man, likes to
lump them all together for simplicity’s sake.
The world is much easier for him to understand if he can merge each of
these disfavored concepts into a common enemy, as it allows him conceptualize
all of politics as one giant tug-of-war between good and evil.

Consequently, if some immigration issue has been in the news recently, he’ll
say things like “Obama’s promoting open borders so his fellow Muslim liberals can complete their Sharia takeover of the US!”thereby implicating four of his
favorite boogeymen in one sentence. Or
maybe he’ll hear Rush Limbaugh say something about Obama “importingatheist South American socialists to finish installing cultural Marxism!”, and that will resonate with him not because
it makes any sense – South Americans are predominantly Catholic, with more
conservative cultures than our own – but because it links three more of his
least favorite things, so it comports with the worldview he already holds.

He’s not alone in this regard. These
theories appeal those who feel very passionately about rudimentary conservative
principles, but lack the education, fair-mindedness, or access to unfiltered
information to develop a more cogent interpretation of reality. Some of them go on to be Alex-Jones type
conspiracy theorists, going so far as to link it all with the Illuminati or new
World Order or One-World-Government-scheming from the UN.

Educated
people like you and I recognize these are crackpot theories. We roll our eyes at conservative efforts to
wrap up everything they hate in one bundle, just so they can denounce the
world’s demons in one breath. We can
debate Obama’s merit as a president, and Islam’s merit as a religion, and socialism’s
merit as an economic ideology, and the merit of immigration restrictions as policy,
and the merit of the UN as an institution – but we should recognize that each
of these things are separate issues, such that some of them can be good while
others of them are bad. It’s important
to compartmentalize. They are not a package deal.

Unfortunately,
arch-conservatives are not the only ones who make this error. People of all political persuasions and
intelligence levels often are guilty of the same thing. Consider the following list of things progressives
think are bad, and ask yourself how many on the left are convinced they are fundamentally
linked:

Abortion restrictions

Sexism

Racism

Homophobia/Transphobia

Police
abuse

Nationalism/excessive patriotism

Hawkish
foreign policy

Capitalism

Pollution

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to help a progressive person’s
cause on, say, racism…until they threw in something like “and it’s all to fuel the profiteering of the prison-industrial
complex!”

Of maybe we’re discussing foreign policy, and I’m nodding along with how the US
must reign-in its militarism abroad and resist the urge to intervene further in
Syria…but then the person blurts out “and I’m so tired of imperialistic Western
colonizers raping the Middle East of its resources!”

I am proudly pro-choice, but it’s seemingly impossible nowadays for my
pro-choice peers to have a conversation with (or about) my pro-life friends
without attacking them as draconian misogynists – as if we are incapable of
fathoming that pro-life beliefs could possibly stem from anything besides the
hatred of women.

I
am appalled by many things our government does, but it does not follow that
patriotism is unwarranted. I too am
committed to avoiding catastrophic climate change, but too many on the left see
overthrowing capitalism as a prerequisite to doing so. Those things are not inherently at odds.

Just
like my conservative uncle, progressives like to bundle their bad guys. They are committed to a narrative of the
world which identifies one enemy – selfish white men – and projects that
boogeyman as the root cause of all the world’s woes. Why is global warming happening? Because rich white men in the oil industry
prioritize their profits over everyone else’s wellbeing! Why did we go to war in Iraq? Because rich white men in Halliburton traded
blood for oil! Why do we see so much
police abuse in this country? Because it
helps the profits of rich white men to divide the proletariat by demonizing
black men, rigging the criminal justice system and fomenting racial hatred! On each of these issues, I agree with
left-leaning policy proposals – but I cannot agree with the arguments and
assumptions of those advocating such proposals, which ultimately makes it
tougher for me to join them in advocacy.

The biggest culprit here is what the left calls “intersectionalism” (for those
who don’t know what that is, this is a good primer). The study of intersectionalism is important
and commendable work – I laid out specifically what I like and don’t
like about it here
- but it has an unfortunate tendency to promulgate this bundling fallacy, even
masking it in an academic sheen. Any
analysis of racism or sexism that doesn’t criticize capitalism in the same
breath is now criticized in far-left circles: “it doesn’t include an analysis of class,” they’ll say (by which
they mean, of course, an analysis of class which they find sufficiently
anti-capitalist).

Take the Korryn Gaines case
I wrote about last month. To me, Gaines was
pretty clearly killed because she pointed a shotgun at Baltimore County
Policemen. I suppose it’s fair to debate
her death within the broader context of police abuse; could police could have
deescalated the situation in some other way?
Maybe it’s fair to debate it within the context of gun control; why was
a mentally unstable person able to get a shotgun in the first place? And of course, our country’s racial history
and current events played a role in why Gaines held such anti-police views in
the first place. In conjunction, this analysis poses real questions about
whether Korryn’s death would have happened in another country, with limited
access to firearms, less racial tension, and less aggressive policing tactics.

But the
far left won’t stop at linking those three things. To some, Gaines’ death was proof
of the need for reproductive justice, because “black
women live with the harsh reality of not having full control over the ability
to choose to parent…and to parent the children they have in safe and
well-resourced environments.” Both white
women and white men have been killed by police for far less
violent provocations than raising a shotgun, but don’t tell that to the Crunk
Feminist Collective; to them, Gaines
death was proof that both blackness and femaleness compound police maltreatment. It’s become the chic thing to analyze every
progressive cause within the context of other progressive causes.

The
danger of this intersectional bundling is that it has made the left’s
confirmation bias academically acceptable.
We all develop explanatory ideologies to help us understand the world
around us. Once we forge this worldview,
we all instinctively filter new information through its framework, and then
ultimately decide whether it fits or doesn’t fit. The intersectional approach programs left-wing
people to make it fit. It teaches them to
scour each new story or development or piece of information for links back to
the list of social causes they think
they already understand, thereby enabling regurgitation of memorized leftist
dogma and shunning the task of analyzing the issue anew.

The CFC
concludes their aforementioned article with the heart of what I’m talking
about, writing, “when we pursue a social analysis that fails to robustly consider
patriarchy alongside challenges to white supremacy and capitalism, we’ll miss
the convergence of violent logics.”

I
counter: when you pursue a social analysis that demands you implicate all three
of those things any time you implicate one of them, you obscure the debate with
unnecessary ideological baggage.

Progressives talk so much about privileged people “derailing” the conversation,
but taking gratuitous shots at capitalism in conversations that previously had
nothing to do with economics does exactly that. Insisting we can’t address police abuse
without first addressing capitalism’s supposed role prevents or shuts down
productive discussion on the issue of police abuse, by deterring people who
don’t share your assumptions on capitalism.

Likewise,
opposing a hawkish foreign policy will require building a coalition of
peace-loving people that is considerably larger
than the group of people who presently think capitalism is to blame for those
policies. Lots of people – myself
included – think our foreign policy has little to do with capitalism, and you need their help.

Sometimes
there really are connections between issues that people don’t recognize at
first glance, and it’s helpful to point them out. But there aren’t always connections, and even
when there are, not everyone is going to agree about them. That’s okay; it
doesn’t need to be a package deal. I
don’t need to buy all of what you’re selling me to buy into some of it. Clumping together distinct issues for
shorthand convenience is not progressive, it’s just lazy.

Like modern
conservatives, modern progressives believe a lot of things that are pretty much
bullshit. If they won’t accept progress on
anything until we agree with them on everything, they will be
waiting for a mighty long time.